Autism, Made in the USA: the Undeniable Connection Between Vaccines and Autism Spectrum Disorder

By Gary Null and Helen Buyniski

“universal vaccination of pregnant women could get us into a whole new set of problems.”

Word AUTISM and Syringe, medical injection on blue background

Millions of parents believed that vaccines were safe and trusted that they were effective in protecting their children from various communicable illnesses. As a result, they willingly took their children to the doctor’s office time and time again to receive the full range of vaccines. The doctors, nurses and pharmacists proffering these vaccines also believed in their safety and efficacy – after all, scientists in the federal agencies comprising the US public health service, including the FDA and CDC, had decades of experience working hand in hand with pharmaceutical companies and their scientists to make sure that vaccines were safe and effective. The idea that autism or any other brain abnormality could result from the vaccines was considered anathema – simply not possible. Worse still, those people considered anti-vaccine advocates were irresponsible and uneducated shrills who had no peer review-quality science to support their impudent questioning of the safety or efficacy of vaccines. However, 10 physicians and scientists spending approximately 15,000 hours reviewing in detail every scientific study available on vaccine safety and efficacy have found that contrary to accepted wisdom, there is absolutely a connection between vaccines and brain damage, including autism spectrum disorder. The issue is no longer based upon science – it is based upon ideology, economics, and politics.

What follows are actual studies from the peer reviewed literature that were not publicized in the mainstream media and not discussed in any government committees proving the lack of safety and efficacy of these vaccines and their impact upon children’s brains. Our information is not based on politics, profits, or proprietary interests but instead represents one of the most scandalous public health debacles since the Tuskegee experiment. This should not happen – ever. But it has, due to the enormous power and influence that special interest groups, pharmaceutical companies, and their vaccine divisions have within the federal agencies; their control over the stories the media presents, which leads to enormous bias from journalists and medical magazines, and what is taught to physicians, nurses and pharmacists. We’re concerned that we are inundated with propaganda. And what about the “believe all women” movement? Why hasn’t this movement believed more than 2 million mothers who say they saw completely normal development in a child reverse following a vaccine, who saw their children regressing into autism spectrum disorder? We will present the case that indeed there is a connection between vaccines and autism and it’s in the government’s own files. It’s in the government library of medicine a hundred times over. This conclusion comes from independent investigations and respected institutions. Additionally, we will show you the dark side of science, the corruption of ethics at the CDC and the FDA. We will inform you of the Thompson cover-up at the CDC, as well as the Verstraeten collusion in the secret enclave in Georgia that was uncovered by Robert F Kennedy Jr. We have pulled together all these strands to prove our point, and everything we say is fully documented and footnoted.

While researching the controversial link between vaccines and autism – which despite repeated dismissal by all public health authorities continued to persist among parents and in-the-know doctors as autism rates skyrocketed, public health advocate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. stumbled upon a massive coverup that had taken place in June 2000 in Norcross, Georgia. The Simpsonwood conference – officially the Scientific Review of Vaccine Safety Datalink Information – included top scientists and health officials from the FDA, the CDC, the British health ministry, and pharmaceutical industry execs, all gathered to discuss the results of a major study evaluating the negative effects of thimerosal, a commonly-used mercury-based preservative used in vaccines. CDC epidemiologist Dr. Tom Verstraeten presented his findings to the assembled luminaries, concluding,

“the screening analysis suggests a possible association between certain neurologic developmental disorders. Namely tics, attention deficit disorder, speech and language disorders and exposure to mercury from Thimerosal containing vaccines before the age of six months.”1

A syringe in focus with an 8 month old baby blurred in the background.

The transcript Kennedy unearthed through a Freedom of Information Act request bears witness to the mild panic that set in among the audience after Dr. Verstraeten dropped that bomb – they speak over one another with questions, try to minimize the results, and WHO director John Clements even expresses result that the study was conducted at all – since “the outcome of it could have, to some extent, been predicted…I know how we handle it from here is extremely problematic.” While the doctors agree the matter merits further investigation, and even admit it raises “some perhaps disquieting possibilities,” they agree to “embargo” the information until a meeting scheduled for later that month – and then never released it at all. Verstraeten’s study wasn’t even published until 2003, after the conclusion had been rewritten from

“This analysis suggests that high exposure to ethyl mercury from thimerosal-containing vaccines in the first month of life increases the risk of subsequent development of neurologic development impairment, but not of neurologic degenerative or renal impairment. Further confirmatory studies are needed.” 2

to

“No consistent significant associations were found between TCVs and neurodevelopmental outcomes. Conflicting results were found at different HMOs for certain outcomes. For resolving the conflicting findings, studies with uniform neurodevelopmental assessments of children with a range of cumulative thimerosal exposures are needed.” 3

This was his fourth attempt to conduct the study to produce the desired data after the first three had stubbornly showed the correlation he was trying to disprove. After firing off a despairing email to a colleague (“I do not wish to be the advocate of the anti-vaccine lobby and sound like being convinced that thimerosal is or was harmful, but at least I feel we should use sound scientific argumentation and not let our standards be dictated by our desire to disprove an unpleasant theory”), Verstraeten was able to tweak the results by adding patient data from an HMO with younger patients, different diagnosis codes, and dubious recordkeeping thanks to a recent state takeover. It was enough to obfuscate the damning results of the first three “phases” and render the original study meaningless (and therefore publication-worthy). Problem solved! If only it weren’t for that meddling Kennedy…4

It’s worth noting that Dr. Johnson expresses reservations at having his newborn grandson vaccinated with a thimerosal-containing vaccine, but has no such concern for the rest of the country, whose children were injected with toxic mercury for a full two years after he learned of the connection between thimerosal and neurodevelopmental disorders. Worse, while the drug companies that manufactured the thimerosal-containing vaccines offered to remove the offending substance in September 1999, the CDC declined their offer,5 instead waiting until all thimerosal-containing vaccine lots expired in 2002 to officially end its use – lest they lose a few dollars by having to throw away already-purchased doses.6

Kennedy published his Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak in 2014, collecting 400 peer-reviewed studies on the toxic mercury-based preservative. By that time, the number of vaccines that contain the toxic mercury-based preservative had dwindled, reduced to multi-dose flu vaccines, largely due to public protest (the CDC still mandates that dosing children with mercury is safe). Yet the vaccines that still contain thimerosal are regularly administered to pregnant women – posing an even greater threat to the fetus than they did to the newborn child. The FDA warns pregnant women to limit their consumption of tuna fish because of high mercury levels, but sees no contradiction in pushing flu shots on the same women. Eli Lilly itself – manufacturer of thimerosal – called it a neurotoxin and warned maternal exposure could result in “fetal changes” and mercury poisoning, while exposure in children could cause “mild to severe mental retardation.”7 Yet parents are targeted with a barrage of propaganda every year in an effort to shame them into bringing their children in for the flu shot, a vaccine even the CDC admits doesn’t work.8

A 2006 study by Patterson et.al. actually links the development of neurodevelopmental disorders (including autism) to “maternal immune activation,” which would suggest that pregnancy is the worst time to get vaccinated9 – especially with a flu shot that as often as not causes the flu it’s supposed to prevent.10 Patterson confirmed that conclusion in an article that accompanied the study’s publication, warning that

“universal vaccination of pregnant women could get us into a whole new set of problems.”

Pregnant woman with syringe ,Vaccinating A Pregnant Woman

A 2012 study confirmed those findings – yet the CDC continues to recommend delivering a double-whammy of embryotoxic mercury and maternal inflammatory activity to helpless fetuses as a matter of policy – “for their own good.”11

The discontinuation of thimerosal and its failure to halt the rise in autism diagnoses (now 1 in 45, according to the CDC12) have been used against vaccine awareness advocates to claim that there was never any link – that not only was the mercury preservative actually safe, but that no other ingredient could be responsible for triggering the condition either. Yet a quick rundown of the ingredients on many vaccines – aluminum adjuvant, formaldehyde, and chicken embryos – is enough to set off alarm bells, and their sheer number – more than 40 on the current CDC schedule13 – seems excessive even to the most trusting among us.

The aluminum compounds used as adjuvants in vaccines are selected for their immune-system-stimulating effects despite known neurotoxicity and a preponderance of evidence that they cause brain inflammation and other autoimmune symptoms. Dr. Roman Gherardi has found that aluminum is extremely biopersistent and that far from remaining localized at the site of injection, aluminum adjuvant is taken up in the bloodstream and travels all over the body, building up in the brain over the course of years of vaccinations instead of being quickly eliminated as vaccine apologists claim.14 A 2018 study by Mold et.al. found “some of the highest values for aluminum in human brain tissue yet recorded” in the teenage autistic patients the researchers examined – rates 10 times higher than what would be expected in an adult, let alone a child. The location of the aluminum within the brain also suggested it had traveled there via immune pathways, appearing in inflammatory non-neuronal cells called microglia. The researchers concluded this unusual distribution was a “standout observation” in autistic brain tissue and likely played a role in the development of the disorder.15

Drs. Lucija Tomljenovic and Christopher Shaw have studied aluminum in vaccines extensively. In a 2011 study published in the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry, their team found a significant correlation between exposure to aluminum in vaccines and prevalence of autism spectrum disorder. Applying a statistical measure used to assess the causation inherent in a correlation, they were able to confirm that

“the correlation between Al in vaccines and ASD may be causal.”

16 In a comprehensive overview of the literature on aluminum adjuvants, Tomljenovic and Shaw bring together studies confirming these molecules are not only neurotoxic but also endocrine disruptors, genotoxins, immunotoxins, and pro-inflammatories; they also interfere with glucose metabolism, membrane receptor signaling, mitochondrial function and ATP energy transfer, among other homeostatic functions.17 While aluminum’s environmental ubiquity is a source of harms on its own, the body is able to excrete much of what it consumes through food and drink. When injected, however, the human brain doesn’t stand a chance: dozens of studies have confirmed that aluminum adjuvant particles can cross the blood-brain barrier, triggering a devastating inflammatory response in brain tissue. During infancy and childhood, the blood-brain barrier is at its most permeable, rendering the administration of adjuvant-containing vaccines especially destructive. Vargas et.al. published a paper on the link between microglial activation and autism in 2004, demonstrating that autistic patients suffered from lifelong low-level immunoexcitation of the brain, in a study that has been replicated many times.18

A 2017 study by Crépeaux et.al. required a wholesale reevaluation of everything we know about aluminum adjuvants. The researchers found, counterintuitively, that it was actually the smallest doses of the adjuvant Alhydrogel (brand name for aluminum oxyhydroxide, the most common adjuvant used in vaccines) that produced the worst neurotoxic effects. Higher doses were seen to trigger the formulation of protective “granulomas” – a function of the body’s natural immune defenses against hostile foreign intruders – but in small doses the aluminum nanoparticles were taken up by monocytes (white blood cells) as part of the immune response to the vaccine, riding those cells all the way to the brain. The low-dose subjects were those who displayed marked neurobehavioral deterioration.19

No studies were ever conducted to evaluate the safety of aluminum adjuvants before drugmakers decided to use them in vaccines – indeed, the FDA’s ceiling on how much aluminum a vaccine can contain is based on the substance’s efficacy in enhancing the vaccine’s antigenicity, not how it is tolerated in the body. The mechanism by which aluminum acts as an immune adjuvant is poorly understood,20 yet its use is considered safe beyond question as a matter of faith, even though the CDC limits aluminum in parenteral feeding solutions for safety reasons.21 With a vaccine schedule that only expands, never contracts, children today are injected with many times the aluminum load of children 30 years ago, and the weight of the evidence that this substance is toxic cannot be ignored.

A study published in 2018 points to fluoride as another possible trigger for the immunoexcitotoxicity that has been indisputably linked to autism. Strunecka et.al. discovered that the synergistic effects of aluminum and fluoride exposure resulted in far worse inflammation in neural tissue than aluminum or fluoride alone. Worse, the combination of the two neurotoxins has a marked effect on cell signaling, nervous system function, and neurodevelopment when present in lower concentrations than either substance alone. Because the US is one of the dwindling number of countries that persists in adding the industrial byproduct fluoride to its drinking water despite the overwhelming burden of scientific proof of its negative health effects, most children exposed to excessive aluminum through their vaccination schedules are also consuming excessive fluoride – doubly dangerous in conjunction with the biopersistent adjuvant.22

The CDC knows aluminum adjuvants are as toxic and damaging as thimerosal and has exploited this knowledge in the studies it has conducted to “prove” vaccines have no connection to autism. The agency’s scientists administer a “placebo” to the control group that still contains the deadly adjuvant, ensuring they too will be poisoned and thus not differ noticeably in autism rates from the active-vaccine group. At this point, with so many papers in the peer-reviewed literature proving the neurotoxicity of aluminum adjuvants, such a “mistake” in research methodology can only be a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the reality.23 To administer an inert placebo would be to open up the trial to the possibility of meaningful results, a mistake they vowed never to make again at Simpsonwood.

The indictment of aluminum adjuvants should have been complete with a 2015 Chinese study published in the Journal of Neuroimmunology. The study compared three groups – one receiving a tuberculosis vaccine that contained no aluminum adjuvant; one receiving the aluminum-containing hepatitis B vaccine typically given to babies on their first day outside the womb; and one control group. The hepatitis B group manifested heightened levels of IL-6, the cytokine marker for autism, and impeded synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus, a brain area particularly sensitive to the effects of neuroinflammation. The tuberculosis group showed lower levels of IL-6 and increased synaptic plasticity.24 The study seems to confirm that it is not the vaccines as such that have caused such a devastating increase in neurodevelopmental disorders, but medical authorities’ refusal to address the presence of a neurotoxic adjuvant in one of their most lucrative products.

Japan discontinued the MMR vaccine in 1993, four years after imposing it on its citizens on a mandatory basis. The rate of adverse events – including meningitis, limb loss, and death – was 2,000 times higher than expected, and the shot was pulled after doctors confirmed it had entered at least one child’s nervous system and probably at least three. Japan, not coincidentally, has one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world.25 Meanwhile, in the US, California has now mandated child vaccination, and several other states have proposed similar compulsory-vaccination laws while their constituents are bombarded with news stories playing up every measles case as the new bubonic plague. The Idaho Department of Health public information officer Tom Shanahan expressed his regret that his state was unlikely to pass such a measure, complaining to Reuters that in Idaho, “there’s a pretty strong culture of individual rights.”26

In the ongoing debate over the link between vaccines and autism, pediatric neurologist Andrew Zimmerman is the latest pro-vaccine figure to publicly defect, allowing the release of 12-year-old court proceedings in which he testified that vaccines can, in fact, cause autism. In the sworn affidavit, Zimmerman told Department of Justice lawyers with whom he was working to defend vaccines against thousands of claims that he’d

“discovered exceptions in which vaccinations could cause autism.”

Citing his own experiences with vaccine-damaged and autistic patients, as well as “scientific advances,” Zimmerman told the court that

“in a subset of children, vaccine-induced fever and immune stimulation did cause regressive brain disease with features of autism spectrum disorder.”

His timing couldn’t have been more disastrous for the vaccine-industrial complex. Not only did it throw a monkeywrench into the case in which he was serving as an expert witness – cases, to be more accurate, as a cluster of 5,000 vaccine-autism cases were being heard in the vaccine court on June 15,2007 – but as the CDC’s expert witness, his word carried serious gravity and would have opened a Pandora’s box of legal action.

It’s not surprising, then, that Zimmerman’s testimony was covered up for almost 12 years. He was promptly fired, and DoJ attorneys spoke for him in court, describing his position in terms he calls “highly misleading” by claiming there was zero evidence of a link between vaccines and autism.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. certainly thought it was more than misleading, calling the substitution “one of the most consequential frauds, arguably in human history”

and filing a fraud complaint with the DOJ’s Inspector General against the attorneys who covered up his explosive admission.27 But the DoJ attorney who lied to the court is no longer with the department, and to look at the CDC’s website, Zimmerman may as well not have existed – nor anyone like him, or like the children he has studied. His testimony and work have been memory holed, and the CDC categorically denies any and all allegations that vaccines could influence or contribute to – let alone trigger or cause – the development of autism.

Had investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson not surfaced his testimony in her explosive report on the “vaccine debate” earlier this month, weaving another scrap of evidence into what has become a very convincing tapestry, perhaps no one would have heard of it at all. Attkisson has doggedly pursued the vaccine-autism story for over a decade, speaking to whistleblowers, activists, parents, and others affected by the epidemic and refusing to shy away from the topic despite personal repercussions that would dissuade many lesser reporters. Hacked by the government, smeared on Wikipedia, and demonized in anti-“antivaxxer” blogs, she persists in illuminating the dark corners of power.

It is almost a truism at this point to say that the pharmaceutical lobby has Congress and the CDC in its pockets, but congressional lawmakers and their staffers interviewed on the program agree. Rep. Dan Burton, who attempted to investigate vaccines in the early 2000s, and his staffers told Attkisson about the coordinated bullying and intimidation they faced by pharmaceutical lobbyists who “put money everywhere” to ensure no obstacles stood in their profit path, while former Rep. Dr. Dave Weldon confirms that “if you as an individual member [of Congress] want to take on the pharmaceutical industry, it’s ‘forget it.’” The institutional stonewalling has not shaken his faith in the need for an investigation into vaccine safety, and he is certain that

“some children can get an autism spectrum disorder from a vaccine.”

Perhaps weighed down by troubled consciences, or merely encouraged by the rising tide of similar revelations, many formerly pro-vaccine insiders have gone on the record to admit that decades of parental suspicions have been justified. Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former director of the National Institutes of Health who died in 2011, admitted in 2008 that she thought the government was “too quick” to dismiss the concerns of the families of vaccine-injured children “without sufficient studies of causation.” Healy told Attkisson about a 2004 Institute of Medicine report that “basically said, ‘Do not pursue susceptibility groups, don’t look for those patients whose children who may be vulnerable.” Confirming the suspicions of every vaccine choice advocate, Healy admitted “the reason why they didn’t want to look for those susceptibility groups is because they are afraid is that if they found them, however big or small they were, that that would scare the public away.” As for the link between vaccines and autism, she said, “the question has not been answered.”28

Thanks to the widely-seen film Vaxxed, the most well-known (and perhaps controversial) whistleblower remains Dr. William Thompson, the senior CDC scientist who leaked thousands of pages of internal documents to Rep. Bill Posey suggesting that the agency lied about links between thimerosal and neurodevelopmental disorders and links between the MMR vaccine and autism – particularly in black males. The latter link – discovered in November 2001 – was memory-holed, according to a conversation between Thompson and researcher Brian Hooker, with evidential data destroyed the following year, facts Thompson confirmed via affidavit to Posey. When Thompson tried to alert then-CDC director Dr. Julie Geberding of the unpublished findings in 2004, he was replaced with Dr. Frank DeStefano and threatened with termination for “insubordination.” When he tried to leave before they could fire him, they instead paid him a “retention bonus,” which he saw as an attempt to purchase his silence. Two papers Thompson subsequently published connecting thimerosal in vaccines to “tics” in boys were eviscerated before publication, with a 2012 study withheld from publication until he removed the tic data – even though that was the study’s only conclusive result.29 His conversation with Hooker has been attacked by pharmaceutical advocates who claim he didn’t actually expose any wrongdoing but fail to explain why he would have felt it necessary to leak thousands of pages of documents to a sympathetic congressman if he was just discussing business as usual at the CDC.

DeStefano himself acknowledged the possibility that vaccines might play a role in triggering some children’s autism in 2014, choosing his words very carefully in an interview with – once again – Sharyl Attkisson. “It’s hard to predict who those children might be, but certainly, individual cases can be studied…” he said, the absence of a blanket denial speaking volumes.30 To conduct such a study would be professional suicide, of course, which is probably why none have been attempted, but the records of the vaccine court itself – which has paid over $4 billion since its launch in 1988 to indemnify vaccine producers against the inevitable lawsuits from parents whose kids went to the doctor healthy and came home irreversibly damaged31 – speak for themselves. Using the less-radioactive term “encephalopathy,” vaccine court records show some children whose autism onset immediately followed vaccination had preexisting conditions that could render them susceptible to negative effects, including mitochondrial disorders and Tuberous Sclerosis, and the connection between vaccines, these conditions, and autism has been officially acknowledged in multiple cases.

When the government settled the historic case of Hannah Poling in 2010, paying out $1.5 million plus yearly payments that could amount to $20 million over the course of her life after Poling became autistic following a nine-shot vaccination visit, they qualified their seeming admission of guilt by stating that Poling had an underlying mitochondrial disorder that made her vulnerable to vaccine damage and “resulted” in her autism. Hers was the first courtroom admission of any vaccine role in the development of autism, and opened the door to the 4,800 autism cases then awaiting deposition in vaccine court.32 So – of course – they sealed the case.

It leaked out anyway, complete with diagnosis of vaccine-related “autistic encephalopathy,” and complete with Zimmerman’s opinion: he had “personally witnessed [Poling’s] developmental regression” after “vaccine-induced fever and immune stimulation.” They may not have “caused” her autism – he wouldn’t go that far – but they certainly “triggered” it.33

It wasn’t the first financial award to the family of an autistic child that admitted some culpability – that was paid out in the first year of the vaccine court’s existence. In 1986, the court ruled a child’s seizures – a result of Tuberous Sclerosis – were triggered by the DPT vaccine, resulting in his mental retardation and autism. They did not admit the vaccine was entirely to blame, but acknowledged that it was a triggering factor in worsening his prognosis, since the age of seizure onset is directly related to quality of life for individuals with TS.34 These cases have quietly piled up among the millions, many likely saddled with gag orders that prevent parents from speaking up about their experience.

No matter how many whistleblowers go on the record, how many books and articles investigators like Attkisson and Kennedy publish, the CDC have repeatedly held their hands over their ears and screamed at the top of their lungs that they know of no evidence of a link between vaccines and autism, and to study such a thing would be a preposterous waste of time. Aiding and abetting their denial has been the FDA, too busy signing off on untested, unsafe drugs to care about the effects of those it has already approved; and the government itself, confident that money will always oil the wheels of justice.

4 Hooker, Brian et.al. “Methodological Issues and Evidence of Malfeasance in Research Purporting to Show Thimerosal in Vaccines Is Safe.” BioMed Research International. 2014; Article ID 247218. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2014/247218/